Remembering Linda Gray: We will always embrace her spirit | Opinion

I met Linda Gray as a patient — she was sitting at the next table while we were both at physical therapy. We passed pleasantries while we sweated and groaned that developed into conversations, and eventually into lunch dates.

That was more than a decade ago. I never expected those sessions to straighten out problems with my cervical fusion would change my life. But they did.

Linda Gray did.

If you only knew Linda through her public persona and her many accomplishments as a probation officer, magistrate and city councilwoman, then you missed a uniquely valuable human experience.

It’s hard to know where to start.

Maybe with the time we were beading at her house and she got a call from someone needing a job reference. She patiently went through the position requirements and took down the contact data about where to send the information.

“One of my murderers,” she said casually after she hung up.

The man — now in his 30s — had been convicted of manslaughter as a teenager, and assigned to her caseload.

“I almost sent him back several times,” she said, “but there was something that made me think he might make it, so I didn’t.”

I heard many more conversations like this. Who calls up their former probation officer ten, even 20 years later? Who would still be sharing her number with them?

Linda Gray.

Often we would go weeks without seeing each other, though talking or texting daily. Linda and her husband, Harold, were great travelers, and I never knew which state — or country — she’d be visiting this week. In her last week on earth ,she was annoyed because “this damn cough” might keep her from going to Florida.

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We did road trips. We got lost on Pennsylvania back roads looking for tiny Amish gardening sales we’d heard about but didn’t quite know where they could be found.

“There go Thelma and Louise, out among the horses and buggies,” Harold would laugh.

“Don’t buy more flowers than you have the time and energy to take care of,” Linda would tell me in all seriousness as she loaded the back of my van with one, two, three … 12 flats of seedlings.

Linda and Harold had no children, but hundreds of “adopted” nieces, nephews and kids of all genders and colors that they took under very broad wings. I am not sure if the ones still in their teens — who only experienced her mentoring for a year or two — will feel her loss harder than the women and men in their forties, with careers and families.

Accompanied by her Harold and my Steve, we must have eaten at every seafood restaurant in Delaware. Linda was always polite and gracious, but she expected her drinks to be mixed correctly and her entrees to be delivered as advertised. If you were on your toes, you’d end up with the best tip of your week. If not …

It has become fashionable in some circles to advertise yourself as “colorblind,” and claim, “I don’t see colors; I treat everybody exactly the same.” Linda, who knew her history and identity as a Black woman in America, would have none of that.

“If you don’t see colors, then you don’t have a clue how color has been used to keep some people in power and others out of it,” she said.

What Linda saw was people. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, I told her about a young Delaware State University student who’d had to go home to Wilmington when campus closed down. Her mother was hospitalized, her baby sister was hungry, there was no food in the apartment and she’d left her school laptop in Dover.

I thought the young lady might live in her district, and — if so — asked if she could help us get her food and a computer.

“Who cares which district she lives in?” Linda said. “We’ve got to get this girl some help.”

I lost her so fast that I still can’t believe it. On Wednesday she had a cough. By Friday she was in iIntensive care on a ventilator and on Monday evening she was gone.We were supposed to have at least another 20 years together. For Harold, 55 years with his soulmate was not enough.

“God wanted her more,” he said.

Yet in my desolation, if I stop and listen carefully, I can still hear her voice.

If it is true that nobody really dies as long as people remember them, then Linda Gray will have a very long second life, for the people whose lives she touched are numbered in the thousands, and more.

Dr. Faith Newton is a professor of education at Delaware State University and former member of the Red Clay School Board. She lives in Pike Creek.

This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: Wilmington DE's Linda Gray: We will always embrace her spirit